The Night Follows Close

“Day full-blown and splendid—day of the immense sun, action,  
ambition, laughter,
The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and 
restoring darkness.”

—Walt Whitman

Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, Michigan

Summer 2022

I. Darkness

We arrive on the summer solstice, the day yawning so wide with light we aren’t awake when it begins or ends. From the first night of my three-week artist residency, my son has no trouble going right to sleep even before dusk ends, while slumber evades me. All night I have shallow, fitful dreams about electronic devices: misplacing my phone, forgetting my phone, my laptop not starting, my batteries dying, my connections to my digital life failing. I don’t even have my laptop with me, and my phone, useless without a signal, is off. Still, my devices haunt me in the unfamiliar darkness. 

“Two-thirds of the world’s population—including 99 percent of people living in the continental United States and western Europe—no longer experience a truly dark sky, a night untouched by artificial electric light,” writes Paul Bogard in The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light. In Healing Night: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening, Rubin R. Naiman writes that 10 percent of Earth’s population has compromised night vision due to urban glow, adding: “I believe that the majority of us suffer from a chronic darkness deficiency.”

Night sky enthusiasts have been decrying light pollution and singing the praises of darkness for decades. In 2001, Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory called the night sky “the world’s largest national park,” while Dan Duriscoe, an environmental scientist who pioneered night sky protection for the National Park Service, believes that preserving night sky is “an integral part of the wilderness ethic.” A 2007 declaration adopted by UNESCO and the World Tourism Organization called “unpolluted” night sky “an inalienable right of humankind.” And yet, a truly dark sky has become a rarity, in many cases accessible only to those with the means to travel to remote places. 

My sky in the Porcupine Mountains is not even optimum darkness. On the Bortle scale, which is used to evaluate night sky brightness from a 9 (inner-city sky) to a 1 (excellent dark sky), that elusive Class 1 sky is like a unicorn. According to Bogard, “many question if such a sky still exists in the Lower 48.” Later, while looking at a Bortle map online, I discover that my Upper Peninsula sky is Class 2, a “typical truly dark site.” Good, but not “excellent.” Still, it’s much darker than the small city where I now live in Indiana or the one in which I grew up in Southern California, both of them designated as Class 7, “suburban/urban transition.” The city in Russia where I was born is also Class 7. In fact, as I digitally soar around the world, I discover that the majority of the other places that I’ve called home—in Virginia, Nebraska, Connecticut—are Class 7. 

Wide awake in the middle of my fourth night, I go outside to visit the outhouse and am instantly stunned by the depth of the darkness. “This has to be the darkest place I’ve ever been—the deep, dark woods of fairy tales,” I write the next day. “There is almost no sky, due to the trees.” And there is no moon that I can see. I don’t even know where to look for it, what phase it is in. I am estranged from the night sky.

When Sherrie, the Friends of the Porkies volunteer in charge of the artist-in-residence program, first brought us to the cabin, she left us with a warning: “It gets dark here. If you’re going to be out late, bring a flashlight with you to find your way back to the cabin.” I had nodded, without understanding, in the manner of the uninitiated. Sherrie knew what she was talking about. She had spent decades in these woods, had helped to erect this timber frame cabin for artists fifteen years ago. She knew about night in the Porkies.

That first week in the cabin, as I begin to apprehend the contours of darkness, I think about banishment—how we have banished dark, cold, damp, hunger, thirst, all of the discomforts of the wild, thinking we have triumphed, not realizing how we have impoverished ourselves in the process. To come to wilderness is to reacquaint ourselves with some of what we’ve excised from our lives. Bugs, for example. The dark. Night is another wilderness that we have pushed to the margins.

It’s not just artists who come to live in these forests. The Porkies offer visitors an extensive network of rustic cabins that date back to the 1940s and 50s. These cabins have their own logbooks where visitors record their thoughts. I discover this history when I find in my cabin bookcase a volume published in 2001 titled The Porcupine Wilderness Journals that compiles highlights from many of these logbooks. Here, in these pages, are other people who had communed with the darkness.

On June 12, 1975, Doug F. wrote, “Do you know how black it is when you shut your eyes inside a closed closet? Well, it was the same way here last night. It didn’t matter if your eyes were open or shut, you saw the same thing—absolutely nothing. Joe said it scared him when he first woke up during the night. He thought he had gone blind from drinking the river water!”

On September 23, 1980, an unknown visitor wrote, “New worlds are seen through the widened pupils of the night. Thoughts, like shooting stars, emerge and glisten in all corners of the sky. Some live only as long as an initial spark—others take the unlikely turns of a cedar’s roots upon a rock.”

Darkness is not a monolithic state. Just as there are many qualities to light, there are many qualities to darkness. And yet, because our sense of sight dominates, at least for the sighted among us, we relegate any experience of darkness to a single category. “When we see images of deep caves or megalithic recesses we can only do so because of camera flashes and other artificial means of lighting,” writes Robert Hensey in The Archaeology of Darkness. “What we are actually photographing is the temporary removal of darkness. Darkness is the opposite of ‘illumination’, enlightenment—and all those other light-oriented words we rely on so heavily to describe understanding; the dark is where the unseen, unformed and misunderstood things abide, that which has not been examined in the cold hard light of day.” Darkness is the antithesis of image—at least in its visual sense. Darkness eludes our ability to capture it. We assume there’s nothing there. Then we shine a light on it, annihilating it, and declare it empty, a negation.

I begin to wonder: What if, rather than being a diminished state, darkness is an enhanced state wherein we access subterranean parts of ourselves? What if darkness is not the absence of light, but rather light is the absence of darkness? What if we can be endarkened, just as we can be enlightened? Whatever’s happening to me in the Porkies feels like an endarkening.

II. Illumination

We now speak of nature deficit disorder and environmental generational amnesia and shifting baseline syndrome. We have created many terms to talk about what happens to us when we are cut off from the wild. “If you have never known a night sky any darker than the one you have now, why would you think anything is wrong?” asks Bogard. If you have never seen the Milky Way, how do you know what you’re missing?

There is an apocryphal story about the 1994 Northridge earthquake: when Los Angeles lost power, emergency centers and even the Griffith Observatory received numerous calls from frightened people reporting a “giant silvery cloud” over the city. That mysterious cloud was, of course, our very own Milky Way Galaxy. According to Bogard, 80 percent of children born today (Bogard was writing in 2013) will never see the Milky Way. Our own night sky has become foreign to us.

Meanwhile, our artificial lights grow ever brighter; just observe the gas station/food mart/rest stop oases on interstates that are illuminated as bright as operating theaters. “As our surroundings grow brighter, we grow used to that level of brightness, and so anything dimmer seems extraordinarily dim, even dark,” writes Bogard. We have exchanged our view of the Milky Way for a well-lit strip mall. 

When I assigned a portion of Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder to my college writing students in 2015, many of them nodded along in agreement with Louv’s message. “Oh, yeah,” they said. “He’s totally right. When I was a kid, we used to play outdoors, but now, kids don’t go outside anymore.” They told anecdotes about younger siblings, cousins, kids they babysat. “But do you realize,” I asked them, “that this book was published ten years ago, when you were children? Do you realize that you are the children Louv was writing about?” They shook their heads. No, this wasn’t true of them. They went outdoors plenty. “How do you even know what you’re missing?” I asked them. They stared back at me. “How do I know?” I added, thinking of my own 1980s suburban childhood, the prophecies that foretold a doom brought on by too many TV shows and video games. 

In The Outermost House, Henry Beston writes:

With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? … to-day’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial light, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day. 

Were it not for his slightly dated language, we might suppose Beston is a contemporary of ours, but he is not. A naturalist, Beston lived in a cottage on the dunes of Cape Cod in the mid-1920s, publishing his book about his experience in 1928. Even a century ago, he recognized the detrimental effects of artificial light. He recognized, long before many others, that we were losing the night.

Thomas Edison, who is probably as responsible as any individual can be for the electrification of the world, was a man who scorned sleep. He wrote, “Most people overeat 100 percent and oversleep 100 percent. The extra 100 percent makes them unhealthy and inefficient.” Famous for taking brief “cat naps” in his lab, he also said, “Everything which decreases the sum total of man’s sleep, increases the sum total of man’s capabilities. There is really no reason why men should go to bed at all.”

Perhaps it was not only his incandescent lightbulb but also his unrelenting work ethic that contributed to creating our 24/7 consumerist culture. With the constant, grinding work of his labs—he tested hundreds of filaments before finding one that worked—he had an assembly line mentality; dogged determination and ceaseless work drove him forward. He was a man who battled the enemies of sleep and darkness, who believed in breakneck progress, technology and innovation moving ever forward, consequences be damned.

As electrification spread its tentacles out from the urban centers into rural areas, those who lived in the deep, dark countryside eventually witnessed the wonder of illumination. That moment when electricity was connected to a house came to be known as “zero hour.” As Jane Brox describes in Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, “The first thing some did once they were hooked up was to turn on every light and then drive down the road just to look back at their illuminated house.” It must have felt like a miracle.

III. Wakefulness

I start waking in the night and listening to the darkness: the scritch of an animal, the song of our river, fluctuating from a soft sibilation to a barreling roar, depending on recent rainfall. Lucid but subdued, I rise, put on shoes, slip from the cabin to wander the forest. Life teems among the stately hemlocks: the thrum and whine of insects, the dark rustlings among plants, the delicate wake of a flying creature cleaving the air, the sudden twitch and scamper of a being I can’t see. 

These hemlocks are the trees of fairy tales. In the cabin I find a 1981 copy of Michigan Trees and pore over the entry on Eastern hemlock, learning that mature trees form “a massive, pyramidal, ragged crown of densely foliated branches.” They are “highly shade tolerant; very slow-growing; very long-lived (600+ years),” and they “may exist 50-100 years or more in the shaded forest understory and gradually reach the overstory.” A hemlock tree, once established, “creates its own microclimate.” 

It’s among these giants that I prowl every night; I live in their world. Each night, I wander the perimeter of our cabin, absorbing the darkness, apprehending the night, drinking it in through all my senses, and then I return to the cabin and go back to sleep until morning.

In his meticulously researched history of the night, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, Roger A. Ekirch describes a phenomenon that he calls segmented sleep. “Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness,” he writes. Night was bifurcated into “first sleep” and “second sleep,” linked by a period of alertness during which people would socialize, read, or “ponder visions in the dead of night,” among other things. Ekirch calls these late-night wakeful periods “our oldest path to the human psyche.”

What we now consider “normal” sleep—an unbroken eight-hour stretch—is, in fact, a relatively recent development. “Sleeping in one straight shot through the night—‘consolidated’ sleep—has become a near-universal expectation, even for those whose bodies and minds seem naturally inclined to shut down and switch back on differently,” writes Benjamin Reiss in Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. “Would-be sleepers are encouraged to develop rigid bedtime routines, regardless of season or setting. Sleep is supposed to occur in a private and almost neurotically sealed space, with, at most, two consenting adults sharing a bed.” Before coming to the Porkies, before finding my sleep broken in two with a period of nighttime lucidity, I had never questioned the gold standard of consolidated sleep. 

For a class on the history of the English Language, my older child, D., once wrote a paper on the history of the word blind. “When describing a place or object, blind meant that the subject was dark or dim; for example, a candle might be said to be blind if it was only emitting dim light,” they wrote, continuing:

When a place is poorly lit, you are blind, in a blind place. When light returns, you cease to be blind. There is an implied blamelessness here—to be blind means to be destitute of sight, but the failure to see might not be in the seer’s physical inability to see but rather in the environment or object’s failure to be seeable.

This understanding of blind feels more capacious to me. In the Porkies, I am blind in a blind wood. The condition is mutual and temporary, rooted in a particular experience, not in a permanent state or identity. Our modern conception of blindness limits the range of experiences the word once encompassed. To place blindness wholly within the eyes, to define it as a mechanical failure of the body, banishes other kinds of blindness from our understanding of ourselves and the world. The rigid demarcations between sleeping and wakefulness, between self and other, are growing more porous.

A creature who lives between the shingles of our cabin’s roof sometimes gnaws and scratches in the night, rousing me to nighttime lucidity. The membrane of the cabin—the skin that protected my human world from the wilderness outside—seems so thin. I rise and go outside, answering the call of the darkness. 

Roaming in the forest late at night, I think of my teenaged, night-wandering self of three decades ago. During my California summer nights, after gorging on MTV and Nintendo, I would go outside and wander, lingering in the corners of darkness, bathing under the orange glow of suburban streetlights. I craved transgressions of all kinds—cigarettes, alcohol, stoner boys—and constantly pushed back on what felt like the narrowly circumscribed boundaries of my life. Night was a time to evade scrutiny, to roam free, to feel my feral self come into her own. Some nights I walked the empty streets to Box Springs, my beautiful sleeping mountain range, draped on the edge of my neighborhood like a fallen giant. I imagined her always as a woman, buxom and curved, and her body was dark—dark dark dark like velvet, studded with boulders that pearled under the moon, with the city spreading out around, casting its jeweled light. I lay on the body of the mountain, draped my head over a boulder, imagined the jewels of the city crowning me. Sometimes, I saw the shape of a coyote moving in the darkness. I drank it all in, this life in the shadowlands, satisfying a deep craving for night during those final years before I took up permanent residence in the adult realm and acquiesced to its demands. I always came down from the mountains and returned to my own yard before the sun rose. Sometimes, as dawn rimmed the edges of the sky, I would hide in the bushes and watch my father leave for work. One dawn, I stared directly into his eyes as he stood in the kitchen drinking coffee and peering out at the yard, but he didn’t seem to see me, and I understood why: because I hadn’t yet returned from the night. I hadn’t reassumed my human form. 

For four years in the mid-1970s, my parents lived in separate places—my father in the U.S., my mother in the Soviet Union. During that time, my mother most often wrote to my father at night, the only time that was truly hers. She scorned sleep because there was always so much to do—books to read, music to listen to, thoughts to have—but also, she had to wrest time away from her daytime demands of teaching at the university, writing her dissertation, caring for a young child. I write from deep night, she often began, alternating back and forth between her native Russian and her limited English. The word for deep in Russian also means profound, and when she wrote in English, she used the latter word. I write to you from profound night. I prefer this translation. And in those long, profound nights, she wrote and wrote. 

Soon the night will end, and I am still writing a letter to you, but this is so wonderful—to remember you and to talk to you at least mentally. I have a feeling that with every letter we penetrate one another more deeply. No one has ever understood me as well as you. And it seems to me to be a real miracle that you understand me better and better, that no limits to this understanding appear—it’s as though your soul is boundless in its love for me. My need to see you, talk to you, be with you is now more important than everything else in the world. It is already getting light. The night is ending. I need to sleep at least two or three hours. Forgive me for ending this letter. I would like to talk with you endlessly.

The only thing that made sleep worthwhile for my mother was the promise that she might see my father in her dreams. You come to me in my dreams at night; I am grateful to fate for my dream glimpses of you. In dozens of letters, she reports on her dream visions. I saw you tonight in my dreams. You were holding my hands in yours—this was such a delight—also because I saw your face—your extraordinary face. She remained a creature of the night, even after moving to the U.S. and being reunited with my father. I always had the impression that she lived her real, vital life in the night, that she expended her night energies on my father, on herself, on her deepest thinking and feeling, and that the mother I knew was a faded, diminished self, exhibiting a flatness and weariness as she faced the tedium of daytime life.

One late night, while reading through the unfinished logbook in my cabin by the light of a gas lamp, I discover a poem written by 2012 artist-in-residence Francis Kazemek. He wrote about standing in a clearing beneath hemlocks, looking at a starry sky. Perhaps, I think, he had rested in this very chair to compose these lines. The membrane of time that separates us—just ten years—feels so thin, so permeable, that I nearly sense him in the room with me. “Stars glitter a kind of hope,” the poem concludes, “For something I can’t imagine.”

I go out and look up at the stars burning in the deep lake of sky between trees, feeling the same hope for something I can’t imagine. Or maybe I could imagine it, and it was just this: to stand with hope beneath stars. Maybe that is all many of us want, in an age when hope is in short supply, when apocalypse feels nascent. Maybe we don’t need to know what the hope is for but only that it is possible.

IV. Dreamers

When my children were small, we often planned to meet in our dreams. “Where do you want to meet tonight?” one of them would ask as I was tucking them in. We would agree on a place—the beach at Hammonasset, a peak in the Box Springs Mountains, the ruin of Cair Paravel in Narnia, a Russian birch forest near the hut of Baba Yaga. My children, who shared a room then, would tell elaborate stories about the train that they would ride on their journey to sleep, what would happen once they arrived in their dreams. Of course, we never all managed to arrive at our designated location, but the point was in possibility, in dreaming of our dreams in advance.

Maurice Sendak’s dreamworlds and nighttime journeys—Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There—were loved and feared by my children. In childhood, we live with a keener awareness of darkness and night, of our night selves, of the deeply symbolic language of dreams. Nightmares and night terrors are common. A baby sister kidnapped by goblins in the dark of night, a boy who dons a wolf suit and sails to an island to romp with wild creatures, another boy who falls naked through his dream into a night kitchen where he is nearly baked into a cake: these are all the fabric of childhood dreams, which often balance precariously between delight and terror. 

I vividly recall a night terror I experienced at the age of four or five when my parents and I still lived with my paternal grandparents. Sleeping in my aunt Susan’s old bedroom on an antique chaise longue upholstered in lavender satin, I recall the terror of being trapped in an indeterminate realm between waking and sleeping as a hideous wolflike monster attempted to devour me. I was lucid enough to have a murky awareness of my surroundings—my mother and grandmother trying to wrench me out of my terror, my desperate scrabbling at the lavender fabric, my uncontrollable sobbing and screaming—yet my true self was trapped behind a scrim, inside my own vision, which felt like the real, throbbing, monstrous world. I had been turned inside out: my monster world was the real one, and the one in which hands were gripping me and trying to rattle me awake was the dream world. My two protectors, the denizens of the waking world, were strangers, intruders, taking me away from who I really was, from the horror of a monster that had sprung up in my own mind. Slowly, they pulled me out of the depths, saving me from my nighttime self. Reserved and exhausted upon my return, I did not feel grateful for their rescue. Forever after I felt changed—a feeling that faded but never disappeared.     

In the cabin, I listen to my boy sleep, but his rest is placid, undisturbed. He is beyond the realm of childhood when his mind is so permeable to darkness. At fourteen, he is soundly sleeping his way to adulthood. 

We go backpacking for four days, and when we return to the cabin, my aunt Olga starts coming to me in my dreams. It’s always the same: she’s running through the forest, and I’m following her, struggling to keep up. Sometimes, we’re running through a Russian forest on the outskirts of Samara where both she and I were born, sometimes we’re running through the forests of the Upper Peninsula, and sometimes I can’t tell where we are because I’m so desperate to not lose sight of her as she darts among the trees that I can’t apprehend my surroundings. Most of the time, she runs in the nude, barefoot, svelte and self-possessed as a wild animal, while I lumber clumsily behind, wearing unsuitable clothing that trips me and snags on branches. In every dream, no matter how fast I run, I lose her to the wild, the dark.

I knew Olga, my mother’s younger and only sister, in the first three years of my life, and later, during my Russian summers when we went back to visit. Olga smoldered with intensity, her penetrating gaze boring into me, her questions probing the depths of our existence. Why do we live? How do we live? How is the human animal different from other members of the animal kingdom? She was a voracious seeker of meaning. Art was her religion. She devoured books—Herman Hesse, Mikhail Bulgakov, Goethe, Carlos Castaneda—and especially music. Listening to Verdi on her scratchy record player, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, she would get a remote, rapturous look in her eyes as she stared straight past me, at some vision I couldn’t see, reaching for some orgasm of the mind. There! There! she would cry. Did you hear it? 

Outspoken and honest to the point of rudeness, she always said what she thought, eschewing politeness and small talk. As a child, she chalked anti-Soviet sentiments on the sidewalk; as a young adult, she walked the streets wearing jean shorts and smoking, indifferent to the old women, the babushkas, who chided her for indecency. Her quiet and stoic parents, who had suffered through Stalin’s purges and the unimaginable bloodshed of the Russian twentieth century, looked upon their daughter in horror; they had learned that there is a chasm as wide as death between what you think and what you say. Olga, born five years after Stalin’s death, had disdain for her parents—for their meekness, their unquestioning acceptance of the drudgery of Soviet life. Conflict crackled between them for years, especially since even in adulthood Olga had to keep living at home. As a single woman, she was not eligible for her own apartment in the Soviet Union. And she would never marry, because she was involved with an older married man, Dzhon, with whom she carried on a decades-long affair. You may walk completely nude in front of your husband, she informed me one summer, and by husband she meant her mate for life.

Olga told her fortune in elaborate rituals, divining the future in cards and by staring into the murky depths of mirrors facing one another to glimpse the amorphous shape of what was to come. Despite her mystical leanings, she also had a scientific mind. Trained as a biologist, she saw human beings as members of the animal kingdom, as organisms worthy of scientific study. Her love of animals knew no bounds; she filled that small Soviet apartment with mice, cats, dogs, canaries, even hissing cockroaches. She also loved the outdoors. In the summers, she often spent weeks at the family’s dacha, a rustic shack on a plot of land where my grandparents gardened and cultivated fruit trees. She loved her solitude. Being alone with her own mind gave her the deepest pleasure.

And she luxuriated in sleep. I am going to go sleep now, she would announce, with joy and anticipation, and then she would disappear for hours. Her long sleeps often happened during the day, because her nighttime hours were devoted to reading and listening to music and rapturing. For Olga, sleeping was not a waste of time, a necessary banality. Rather, sleep held the promise of insight. Upon waking, Olga recounted her dreams with the care and seriousness that she gave to the events of her waking life. She read her dreams like auguries that held portents and wisdom.

The boundary between actually being in the forest and dreaming of being in the forest starts to dissolve. In my bifurcated night, I rise and go outside during my watchful time. During my sleeping time, I’m still in the forest, trailing my aunt, who is leading me somewhere, if only I could keep up, if only I could overcome my daytime self and claim my wild, night self. She’s leading me to the real darkness, the very heart of night, where she has made her permanent home. But every time she outruns me.

Beston tells us that night “is the other half of the day’s tremendous wheel.” The poet Bill Yake writes that “half the forest is night.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a German physicist of the eighteenth century, observes: “Our entire history is only the history of waking man.” In other words, we are missing half the story.

“Sleep would seem to be resistant to literary treatment, because nothing ‘happens’ while we sleep, and in a sense we’re not even ‘there’ to have anything happen to us,” writes Reiss. But what if, just as darkness is not merely an absence of light, sleep is not an absence of consciousness, a swath of empty, lost time? My entire history has been a history of my waking self. What if I endeavored to tell the story of my nighttime self? I wouldn’t know where to begin. 

When I teach fiction in my introductory creative writing class, I stipulate my students must write a realistic short story, adding the alliterative addendum: “no dogs, no dreams, no drugs!” I explain that I don’t want a story with a tired twist ending—which so many novice writers believe to be clever—in which on the fifth page of a six-page story, we discover that the narrator is actually on drugs, or is dreaming, or is a dog, all of which could effortlessly explain away any weirdness or plot incongruities. I tell my students I don’t want to become emotionally invested in characters whose story is built on deceit. And besides, dream worlds (whether produced by a sleeping, hallucinating, or a canine mind) do not follow the rules of fiction, which are the rules of cause and effect. As E. M. Forster famously declared, the king died and then the queen died is merely a story, whereas the king died and then the queen died of grief is a plot. Narratives of dream states tend to be a string of unconnected events—this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened—with no cause and effect. What we want in fiction, I tell my students, is plot. 

I wonder, though, if my impatience for dream states is actually a resistance to altered states of consciousness, a prejudice for the logical and rational. “Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science,” writes Beston, who sees science as a realm of the day and poetry as a realm of the night. These are words to live by, yet so often—most of the time—my own writing is dominated by the rational, the empirical. Perhaps poetry, more than any other genre, is the most direct conduit to our dream selves, and the fact that I am not a poet shows my affinity for the light of day. Since I shed off my teenage rebellion, since I eschewed darkness to become an adult, I am no longer at home in the night world.

During one of my Russian summers, maybe 1984 or 1987, when I was nine or twelve and all of us (three generations) lived in that two-room apartment, I remember being up one night, not fully awake, wandering the rooms. I moved around the foldout beds, the sleeping mounds of flesh that felt so remote to me, then came into the kitchen, and there she was. Olga. She sat on a stool at the small table, perfectly still, her luminous eyes filling her face, looking into me deeply but also looking through me, like she was there but not there. She was her night self, and I was my night self, and we said nothing. We met that way in a mutual dream, our private night place—a place where we don’t normally encounter others. We communed in the kitchen, night soul with night soul, and then I went back past the sleeping bodies, back to my rickety cot, and I didn’t remember any of this until I was in the Porkies, until Olga started seeping into my dreams, until our night selves started to meet, until I realized that she was someone who always perceived her reality as through the filter of a dream, reading her life as deeply symbolic and strange and luminous.

In college, I spent many hours in the darkroom doing black-and-white photography. It’s an irony, perhaps, that in order to create objects for viewing—images—we went into the darkness where we could not see. I am not thinking of the room where I made prints from negatives, where there was a weak red light to see by, but rather of the utter blackness of the cramped space where I removed the film from my camera and deposited it by feel into the cannister in which I developed it. 

Olga, too, dabbled in photography. There was no darkroom in the apartment, so when she removed film from her camera, she would climb into the heavy wooden wardrobe, and her mother would lock her in, since there was no way of latching the door from the inside. One time, Olga told me, her mother locked her in and went to the kitchen, where she started cooking, and forgot all about Olga, who was trapped in among the winter coats, muffled and screaming, separated from her mother by the massive walls of Stalin-era architecture. Once she conquered her claustrophobia, though, the darkness astonished her. She plunged through layers of darkness, each one darker than the last. For what felt like hours, she fell into profound darkness, and when her mother finally remembered her and let her out, Olga was enraged at the interruption, insulted by the blinding light, averse to returning to the illuminated world. She couldn’t believe that long, luxurious plunge into darkness could be undone in an instant, at the turn of a key.

Later, after the Soviet Union fell, after my grandfather died, Olga had a child, my cousin Margarita. Later still, after my grandmother died, after Margarita got older, Olga started going on long expeditions into the Zhiguli Mountains, Samara Bend National Park, the wild areas around Samara. After her partner, Dzhon, died and Margarita moved into her own apartment, Olga grew more and more enamored of the wilderness. She remained fiercely independent, adoring her solitude, forging her own way. 

One night, I dream I’m a tree. I gaze upon the cabin with a new horror, seeing it for what it really is: made of the flesh of fallen kin, death and murder on display. But immediately upon having this thought, my understanding shifts, and I realize I’m not an I at all, that trees do not interpret the world in personal ways, that they grow out of the compost of the forest floor, a place of birth and death comingling. They don’t worry for their dignity or their souls. They don’t shudder at the sight of downed wood. Rather, they live in the cycle of life and death from which we struggle with all our might to extricate ourselves.

In another dream, the trees are on the move, shifting in the darkness of the night, pulling up their roots and dragging them to new locations, speaking to one another in deep, gravelly voices in a register so low it’s all but inaudible to human ears. I stare wide-eyed into the night to see where they are going, but the lumbering dark shapes of craggy giants are nearly invisible in the darkness. Straining to hear their mutterings, I understand nothing.

And always, deep in the blind wood, Olga slips through the trees.

In the spring of 2020, Olga had a vivid dream that she related to Margarita: she was standing in the forest with a mountain before her when she heard Dzhon’s voice emanating from behind the mountain, calling to her, but she refused to answer him. Suddenly, the phone that she was holding in her hands began to ring, and the caller ID read Dzhon. Then Olga’s mother walked up to her and said, “Answer the phone. Dzhon is calling you.” But Olga did not answer the phone, and then she woke up. At the time, she read the dream to mean that she was to go on living, since she did not listen to the advice of her deceased mother or answer the call of her dead lover. But shortly thereafter, she did answer the call. Olga died during our pandemic summer in a Covid hospital in Samara at the age of sixty-two. 

V. Illumination

As someone who has always lived with easy access to the comforts of modern civilization—shelter, heat, light, food, water—I cannot claim to know what life was like without electricity, nor would I ever say that we would be better off without artificial light. “The dark was, for all of human existence, a palpable and universal obstacle to human happiness,” writes Ernest Freeberg in The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America. “Throughout history, to be in darkness was to be diminished, shuttered from the world.” I cannot disagree. 

And yet, there is a pernicious link between the hunger for illumination of the Industrial Age and the dark side of capitalism. Freeberg explains: 

Some friends of the working class predicted that electric light, which seemed to promise middle-class consumers nothing but pleasure and convenience, would only bring further misery to the working class. Forced by poverty to work whenever bosses offered them the chance, and even to send their children into the factories, these industrial workers found some small measure of protection in the darkness, the one time when the ‘taskmaster’ could not demand their toil. Now a flood of inexpensive artificial light into fields and factories threatened to erase this natural, God-given safeguard against exploitation. 

Artificial light meant workers could labor around the clock, no longer finding liberty in darkness.

In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep, Jonathan Crary writes of the ways in which contemporary capitalism has commodified and exploited every basic necessity—hunger, thirst, sexual desire, even friendship—with the exception of sleep. Crary argues that sleep—with its lack of productivity, its passivity, its profound remoteness from our connected consumer lives—is one realm of our lives that stubbornly resists commodification. “Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.” 

Capitalism, though, has certainly tried to steal sleep from us: through artificially illuminated nights, through the alluring promise of glowing screens, through the standardization and consolidation of sleep. Capitalism steals sleep from us and then sells it back in the form of drugs, teas, supplements, sleep aids, self-help books, therapy. We can see examples of this elsewhere: the corporations that peddle carcinogens in products emblazoned with pink cancer awareness ribbons, selling both the disease and a promise of its cure. 

In 1916, Edison started going on camping expeditions with his industrial tycoon buddies, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, accompanied by the naturalist John Burroughs. Freeberg writes:

Edison joined the growing movement of Americans who longed for something missing in their hectic urban lives, something that might be restored if they could only get ‘back to nature and rough it in the wilderness.’ ‘I don’t want to be near electricity,’ Edison explained to reporters. ‘An old suit, an old hat, a few French novels and the fishing rod, that’s all I bother with.’ Touring the Adirondacks, his ‘gypsy’ band of celebrity industrialists searched for the small dirt roads where they hoped to avoid all those other touring motorists who shared this desire for a less hectic, rural way of life. Edison described his annual escape into the woods as his ‘feeble protest against civilization.’

He might be said to have been seeking an escape from the very civilization he helped to create.

“Sleep disorders are the most prevalent health concern in America and probably the rest of the industrialized world today,” writes Naiman. And light at night—especially the blue light of screens—inhibits our ability to produce melatonin, which in turn interferes with our sleep. Poor sleep has been linked with a host of health issues including obesity, viral infections, heart disease, all types of cancer. It might not be much of an exaggeration to say that artificial light is killing us.

And the lure of screens—which promise news, entertainment, companionship, fulfillment—is powerful indeed. Information overload, be it through the channels of telegraphs and daily printed newspapers of the nineteenth century or the 24/7 internet news cycle and doomscrolling of the modern age, has been a threat to sleeping and dreaming for over a century. Indeed, as far back as the seventeenth century, when empiricism and scientific thinking began to hold sway, the dream life started to fade from prominence.

“For all the cultural diversity in how dreams were understood from antiquity into the 1500s, there is nonetheless a near-universal acceptance of dreaming as integral to the lives of individuals and communities,” writes Crary. “Only from the seventeenth century does this singular element of sleeping begin to be marginalized and discredited. Dreaming cannot be accommodated within conceptions of mental life based on empirical sense perception or on abstract rational thought.”

Banishing our dreams to the realm of the irrational and insignificant, viewing them as “a mere self-regulatory adjustment of the sensory overload of waking life” that has “neurochemical explanations,” as Crary writes, we explain away our luminous nighttime selves as a wacky side effect of brain circuitry, mere detritus that our waking selves shrug off.

Visionary writers of dystopian fiction have been expressing our anxieties about artificial illumination and the hijacking of our sleep and dreams for well over a century. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, written in 1920–21 following the Russian Revolution of 1917, portrays a society built on logic and mathematical precision in which dreaming has been completely eliminated. When the unnamed narrator experiences a dream, he concludes he must be ill. “I have never dreamed before,” he reports in his journal, continuing: 

They say that with the ancients dreaming was a perfectly ordinary, normal occurrence. But of course, their whole life was a dreadful whirling carousel—green, orange, Buddhas, sap. We, however, know that dreams are a serious psychic disease. And I know that until this moment my brain has been a chronometrically exact gleaming mechanism without a single speck of dust. But now . . . Yes, precisely: I feel some alien body in my brain, like the finest eyelash in the eye. 

That he feels his dream state to be an intrusion from the outside reveals the degree to which society has suppressed irrational, individual desires. Dreams are dangerous—a “disease” which must be eradicated—because they represent an internal wilderness beyond the control of the state. 

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932, envisions a society that adheres to Fordism—as in Henry Ford—which is built on the principles of the assembly line (standardization, consumerism, mass production). Human beings are engineered in artificial wombs to belong to predetermined classes, and much of their conditioning is done via hypnopaedia or “sleep-teaching.” Through all of their sleeping hours, children hear the same messages repeated, hundreds and thousands of times over years, until they are fully internalized, “till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind,” as the Director of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre explains. “And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too—all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions.” In a society where unorthodoxy is the greatest threat, the realm of sleep has been fully colonized for propaganda and brainwashing. 

Unrelenting artificial light is another concern of dystopian novelists. Ignatius Donnelly’s 1890 novel Caesar’s Column envisions a New York City of 1988 that is illuminated by “the radiance of its millions of magnetic lights, reflected on the sky, like the glare of a great conflagration.” It is a place where “night and day are all one.” And in Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell describes Winston Smith’s interrogation room as being brightly lit with no windows. “In this place, he knew instinctively, the lights would never be turned out. It was the place with no darkness.” For Orwell, unrelenting illumination is another way to erode individuality and privacy. Indeed, the horror at the center of many of these dystopian futures is the destruction of the individual and the standardization of human beings and their experiences. Whether the future is a communist or capitalist nightmare, the underlying threat of homogeneity is the same.

In the young Soviet Union of the 1920s, lightbulbs were known as “Lenin’s Lamps,” and the national electrification project became linked with a socialist ideological vision. Illuminating a path to a glorious Soviet future, electrification would conquer the threats of capitalism, theology, superstition, social hierarchies, and “the coarse backwardness of village life.” Modernization and the inexorable march of technological progress advanced on many fronts, under many different banners. 

In 1987, when my mother and I visited Saratov, the city where she attended university, we came across a bust of Pavel Yablochkov in a city park. When I asked her who this man was, she told me he had invented the lightbulb. “That was Edison,” I corrected her. “Well, in Russia, Yablochkov invented the lightbulb,” she informed me. Later, I learned that Yablochkov had invented a type of arc light known as the “Yablochkov candle” in 1876, three years before Edison’s invention. Later still, I learned that Edison and Yablochkov are national heroes that stand for a kind of progress. The truth is, many people invented the lightbulb, incrementally, over centuries.

“With the chronic suppression of dreams, the color is slowly bleached from our lives, contributing to depression—waking life devoid of its naturally expansive dreamy context,” writes Naiman, arguing that the entertainment industry strives to quell our dream deficit by offering us prepackaged images. Even if the dream were a commodity that could be packaged and sold, it would be a poor substitute for a real dream, which is the manifestation of an individual’s hopes and fears. The dream is an expression of individuality. This is not work that can be outsourced. The consultants can’t be called in. Capitalism cannot sell us our dreams, even though, as Crary notes, “There is a broad remodeling of the dream into something like media software or a kind of ‘content’ to which, in principle, there could be instrumental access.” 

I recoil at the word content. That content creator is an actual job makes me despair. Why do we need content? What emptiness are we filling? Are our lives so impoverished that we must swallow more and more content consisting of empty images and vapid slogans? It’s like the vanishing caloric density of Cheetos, which melt in your mouth, making your brain think you aren’t consuming any calories, so you stuff yourself and are never satisfied. The internet is full of content with vanishing caloric density on which we gorge ourselves, while the world around us burgeons with true content, and so do we. In our dreams, our minds are not creating inane content that can be recorded or commodified; rather, they are doing the ongoing work of the self in its constant becoming.

Three years after Beston lamented our collective loss of darkness in The Outermost House, Edison died at the age of eighty-four. The New York Times reported on October 21, 1931: “Thomas A. Edison, who made the night brighter for humanity, will be buried in Orange, N.J., today, and as a mark of sorrow at his passing, the nation, at President Hoover’s request, will plunge itself into momentary darkness at 10 o’clock tonight.”

President Hoover explained the significance of this tribute: “This demonstration of the dependence of the country upon electrical current for its life and health is in itself a monument to Mr. Edison’s genius.” Indeed, the fact that turning off the lights—rather than the magic of illumination—had become the more dramatic act represented the triumph of light over darkness. We gasp not at artificial light, but at its absence.

Edison’s old camping buddies, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, attended his funeral. According to the Times, Mina Edison, his widow, could see from his gravesite the skyglow over Manhattan from “the lights his genius gave to the world just fifty-two years ago.”

Ford sadly reminisced on Edison’s last finished work before his death: a piece of rubber that was vulcanized from the juices extracted from goldenrod. He worked until the very end.

VI. Madness

With thunder rumbling and a fine rain falling, my son and I decide to tour the Quincy Mine, an old copper mine. On the seventy-mile drive, the rain falls in terrific sheets, deafening us as it pounds against the metal hull of our car. The mine is crowded, the tour similar to others we have been on. This is all part of my daytime life, with the exception of one moment when the guide turns out the lights and plunges us into utter darkness—presenting the dark as a novelty or gimmick—a requisite of every mine or cave tour I’ve ever been on. But always a child squawks, or someone gasps or mutters something inane, and the moment quickly becomes unbearable, and then the guide turns back on the lights, banishing darkness before we’ve truly known it.

On the drive back, the rain becomes a deluge, rendering our windshield wipers useless against the crush of water. Cars creep along with their hazard lights flashing, while some pull over on the shoulder to wait out the storm. We make it back to the parking area near our cabin, then set out on the quarter-mile walk home, discovering a new six-foot-wide stream cutting across our trail. The forest is saturated, glistening, mushroom-scented, turgid, strewn with branches and debris. All night, the engorged river outside our cabin roars. 

By the following day, Lake Superior has turned a turbid brown, and all along the shoreline great snarls of wrecked trees and mottled, water-sculpted crags of wood are strewn, churned up, and regurgitated by the violence of the storm. Beachcombers wander the shore looking for treasures, marveling at these artifacts of the deep. We stop at the visitor center, where the rangers are busy fielding questions from bewildered tourists. Why is the lake brown? Is it always brown? How long will it be brown? The rangers patiently explain that the storm, which dumped more than two inches in just a few hours, roiled up the waters, agitating all the mud and debris. It could be days before the lake is back to its usual self.

That night, in the aftermath of the churning, my aunt Susan comes to me. 

Susan, the younger and only sister of my father, spent her entire adult life institutionalized. Every weekend, my grandmother would bring her home to visit for a day. Susan strode frenetically through the rooms of the house, swinging her arm in a wild arc, a cigarette clenched tightly between her fingers, speaking in a low voice that grew alternately agitated, guttural, hysterical, demonic. She changed her clothes compulsively, a dozen times or more in one visit, casting off the old garments in heaps on the bed. Sometimes, she was aware of the people around her—she’d ask my grandmother where a blouse was, she’d tell me what colors to make Minnie Mouse’s dress in my coloring book, she’d comment on a movie playing on the TV—but much of the time, she was in the grip of the voices that filled her head as she jabbered deep-throated incantations that sometimes sounded like the Gregorian chants my father listened to on his record player. Susan was in thrall to her own powerful visions.    

The Susan I knew was the medicated, stabilized, best-case-scenario version of herself. Before I was born, when she experienced her first visions, she was out of control. By the time I knew her, she was relatively tractable, somewhat sociable. She was also in constant motion. She couldn’t sit still long enough to color a picture or watch a TV show. She could barely get through a song on the radio. She didn’t drive, read books, cook, sew, work, or any of the things the adults in my world did. She flitted in and out of rooms, always on the move, her mind copiously agitated, buzzing. She had the busiest mind of anyone I knew; she was so busy being Susan that it occupied all of her faculties. Being Susan was the most consuming job in the world. 

When Susan comes to me in the Porkies, she appears in a version of a dream that I have been having my whole life. In the original dream, I am with my grandmother and my younger sister and brother, and we have come to Susan’s facility to pick her up for a weekend visit, but rather than waiting for her in the bland reception area, we have somehow become imprisoned behind the door where the mentally ill live. In my dreamworld, it’s a dark dungeon, vast and cavernous, not a building at all but an underground geologic formation—the inside of a cave or a volcano—and it’s my job to lead my grandmother and siblings out to safety. The dream always ended the same way. I was leading my family members single file over a narrow beam that spanned a moat in which horrible monsters roiled and churned while crazy people’s voices screamed and jabbered all around us, echoing off the rock, and then someone would fall in and be devoured: my sister or my brother, sometimes my grandmother. In every iteration of the dream, I turn to look back only to discover I have lost someone to the darkness. 

I stopped having the dream when my siblings got older, and then when my own children were very small, it returned. It was exactly the same story, except I was leading my children through the lair of madness, and my grandmother was rarely with us. In some versions of the dream, the identities of those I was protecting kept metamorphosing; I would be leading my children, but the next time I looked back, they had transformed into my siblings, and then they went back to being my children. It didn’t matter who they were, because I felt equally responsible in either case, and I always lost one of them in the end. I kept having the dream for several years, and then after Susan died in 2016, I stopped having it.

In the Porkies, it returns. I am leading two children in my care through great peril and darkness—only now, we are no longer in a subterranean space. Now, we are creeping through a deep, dark wood, unholy and menacing, surrounded on all sides by unspeakable danger. 

“In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters,” writes Henry David Thoreau. “Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.” Naiman makes a similar point when he writes, “In many respects, dreams are just like waking except much more so.” Waking in the middle of the night in the cabin, I mine my dreams for meaning, searching my visions for some essential truth that is not apparent to my waking self. “Often, persons emerged from their first sleep to ponder a kaleidoscope of partially crystalized images, slightly blurred but otherwise vivid tableaus born of their dreams,” writes Ekirch. He was writing of preindustrial people who experienced segmented sleep, but he could have been writing about me in the Porkies.

Dreams, Crary insists, have “trans-individualistic significance”—or they used to—and they offer us the means to “exceed the isolating and privatizing confines of the self.” Ironically, it is in our private, inexpressible dream states that we may become most attuned to shared visions for humankind. Our most intensely private dreams can be conduits to a more capacious Dream—in Martin Luther King Jr.’s sense of a vision. That we’ve muted that channel, or at least turned down its volume, represents a great loss. We do need our dreams, just as we need our poets, our visionaries.

Walt Whitman is well known for his attempts at creating an inclusive vision of the nation, roving over the geography of the country, capturing its places and people in exhaustive catalogues, exuding optimism and bluster in his manspreading lines that fill all the space and break over, seeping to the horizon and beyond. When he famously declares, “I celebrate myself,” at the beginning of his groundbreaking 1855 Leaves of Grass, he is speaking not only for himself, but for an entire nation. He is celebrating all of us, and his enthusiasm for his task is inexhaustible; indeed, his rewriting and re-envisioning of his book became a lifelong project that ended only with his death in 1892. Some scholars view Whitman as a mystic or a prophet, expressing a uniquely American democratic vision wherein the self is positioned at the center of a zeitgeist that breaks down self-other demarcations and merges the individual with the kosmos (his spelling). Indeed, some speculate that it was a mystical experience that led Whitman to create a work as strange and visionary as Leaves of Grass in the first place.

Now, though, I think not of Whitman’s swaggering daytime self but of his night writings. In his democratic vision, night as well as day and the sleeping as well as the awake are deserving subjects, and, as he writes in his preface, “the deep between the setting and rising sun” is worthy of poetic treatment. I turn my attention to the fourth poem in the 1855 edition, which over the years went by several titles, including “I wander all night in my vision” (taken from its first line), “Night Poem,” and “Sleep-Chasings,” until it ultimately came to be known as “The Sleepers” in 1871 and subsequent editions. This poem has always baffled and troubled me.   

When I taught this poem in a class on Whitman in early 2020, a month before the pandemic closed our college campus, I insisted it was his second most important poem, after “Song of Myself.” I told my students that the critic Paul Zweig saw “The Sleepers” as “the dark twin of ‘Song of Myself.’” But my class notes from that day exhibit my uncertainty, my lack of footing in the poem. My analytical mind cannot get a purchase in its amorphousness. Is the poem about observing sleepers or is the speaker a sleeper? Loss of boundaries between self and others? A plunge into other regions of consciousness? Descent into darkness, ambiguity, madness? Even more fragmented than usual because of the fragmented nature of a nocturnal narrative (which is not a narrative at all)?

“It is a challenge daunting to the poet’s craft: how to make the dream mode of consciousness, the negation and antithesis of wakeful awareness, accessible as conscious experience,” writes critic Alan Trachtenberg. “The Sleepers” throws us into a confusing and murky dreamworld that seems to lack logic: we get images of sleepers—including the victims of violence and trauma, the alienated and estranged, as well as happily married couples, sisters, a mother and child—that adhere to Whitman’s democratic vision and his penchant for cataloguing the breadth of American life, but we also get disjointed narratives about a shipwreck, a swimmer, a slave, a Native American woman, George Washington, Lucifer, and even a whale. At some points, the speaker of the poem seems to be an outside observer watching the action, while at others he seems to merge with those he has been watching, their consciousnesses becoming one. “I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,” he writes. “And I become the other dreamers.” And sleeping, for Whitman, is a democratic, equalizing state. The sleepers “are averaged now . . . one is no better than the other,” he writes. “I swear they are all beautiful, / Every one that sleeps is beautiful . . . every thing in the dim night is beautiful.”

The porous nature of dream-life, coupled with Whitman’s vision of a self that is part of a greater whole, a kosmos, means that the poem eludes interpretation, which, after all, is conducted by our analytical minds, our daytime selves. Trachtenberg claims the poem, “dark and obscure as night itself,” posits a challenge: “Its parts disconnected, its aura hallucinogenic, the poem tasks the reader to question whether it hangs together and, if so, by what overarching theme or logic.” That Whitman dreams the dreams of others and, in fact, becomes those other dreamers, risking the dissolution of his self, I would argue, is an act that achieves Crary’s vision for building community and greater purpose in dream states. Whitman does, in fact, “exceed the isolating and privatizing confines of the self” in his magnificent dream vision, his dreams becoming a Dream.

One night, my dreams offer me a new vision: I am no longer leading children through the forest, rather we are following someone, a shadowy, elusive figure who’s leading us to safety, if only we can keep up. As I keep glimpsing the person flitting through the trees, I struggle to recognize them. Finally, after what feels like hours of pursuit, I discern the familiar wild swing of the arm: we are following Susan. She is leading us to safety, though she seems unaware that we’re even there. Never looking back, she moves rapidly through the forest, and now I see that every time she reappears from behind a tree, she’s wearing a different outfit. And even though she’s walking and we’re running, we’re never able to close the distance between us. I wonder how Susan can be leading us to safety, when to me she’d always represented the danger of insanity. Suddenly, it occurs to me that she is saving us not from the madness of madness, but from the madness of those who try to control the madness. All her life, she lived under the care of people who tried to harness her visions, to temper them, to return her to the banal, blanched world the rest of us inhabit—and now finally, she is roving free of them through my nighttime forest. What if the true madness was not in her but in the rest of the world, the inexorable machine of progress that puts its stamp of uniformity on all of us, and leaches out of us the original and the strange? Many saints were possessed with gripping visions, and I suspect if they lived in our world now, they would have been judged mad instead of holy.

I never saw Susan sleeping. I can’t even imagine her asleep. She had boundless energy; until she was over sixty and using a walker, I never saw her sit still for more than a few minutes at a time. On one rare Christmas Eve when she spent the night at my grandparents’ house, I heard her moving around the house, pacing up and down the upstairs hallway. I even met her there in the middle of the night as she strode through the dark with a glowing cigarette pinched between her fingers, jabbering about mistletoe and jockeys. Wearing a long, old-fashioned nightgown, she was like an apparition unloosed from a fictional world, a ghostly somnambulist from a milieu that made no sense—a gothic horror novel about a madwoman imprisoned in an attic, but set in a dreamscape too personally symbolic to convey any meaning—and she was too bent on her task to see me at all. A small child hiding in the shadows, I slunk past her on my way to the bathroom. She was a true creature of the night, her night-self indistinguishable from her day-self, her powerful visions governing her life always, night and day.

“Were it not for the fact that we are asleep when they occur, we would be obliged to say that our dreams are formally psychotic and that we are all, during dreaming, formally delirious and demented,” writes sleep researcher Allan Hobson. “The study of dreams is the study of a model of mental illness.” Many people have drawn the comparison between dreaming and madness. Charles Dickens, in an essay titled “Night Walks,” wonders about the inhabitants of a hospital for the insane that he passes on his late-night rambles. “Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives?” he writes. “I wonder that the great master who knew everything, when he called Sleep the death of each day’s life, did not call Dreams the insanity of each day’s sanity.”

Indeed, it might be our fear of what appears to be madness that makes us reject and suppress our dreams. As Christopher Dewdney writes in Acquainted with the Night: Excursions Through the World After Dark, “It is a subconscious awareness of our own instability, our potential for madness, that underscores our nocturnal insecurities.” Encountering our night selves might mean acknowledging our unstable, unhinged, even insane, selves.

“By the nature of their illness, paranoid schizophrenics have a very rich, if out of control, hallucinatory inner life,” writes Naiman. “Hallucinations, which can be understood as an intrusion of dreamlike experiences into waking consciousness, may represent the polar opposite of dream suppression—a kind of dream expulsion.”

Perhaps Susan was dreaming always. And what she glimpsed of the waking world was always through the murky scrim of her powerful visions.  

When I was a young child, sometimes I sat very still, intently listening, waiting for the voices inside my head to start speaking to me, waiting to be wrenched from reality by a hallucination so potent that I would become a stranger to everyone around me. I waited in anticipation and terror to be possessed by my singular vision, but it never happened. 

As I follow Susan through my Porkies dreamworld, though, I understand it is no longer her kind of madness that I fear. Rather than a warning of what might happen to me, or to any of us, she becomes a beacon of resistance, insisting on her own way of being in a world that prizes conformity. I understand, moving through the shadowy world between wakefulness and sleep, that we have been gripped with what perhaps can be called a different sort of collective madness: we exist more and more in virtual spaces accessed via screens where we create our digital surrogates, form and maintain relationships, erect worlds and enact lives separate from the temporally and geographically bound forms of our corporeal bodies. We are distilling ourselves to carefully curated digital stand-ins. 

Crary suggests that this urge to disappear ourselves from the limitations of our bodily existence is linked directly to fears of impending climate catastrophe. “The more one identifies with the insubstantial electronic surrogates for the physical self, the more one seems to conjure an exemption from the biocide underway everywhere on the planet,” he writes. “At the same time, one becomes chillingly oblivious to the fragility and transience of actual living things.” Perhaps this is why I feel a desperate need, a compulsion, to go to dark and remote places, to bring along my children and to drag them out of the tent in the middle of the night and show them the Milky Way, to insist they see the beautiful wild—in all its dimensions—before it’s gone. Perhaps this is why I mine my dreams for some version of myself that exists outside of a world broken by greed and consumerism, outside of the vapid digital realms where we cower and post images in despair.

Darkness has become an outpost of wilderness. Sleeping and dreaming have been demoted to the category of banal bodily functions. We have made it possible to glut on all that was in short supply during most of humankind’s history—sugar, fat, light—but have not learned to moderate our cravings. We have been reduced to pure consumers, to content devourers, to gluttons who cannot get enough. Perhaps our most radical turn away from the wild is in becoming an organism severed from others, awash in toxic manufactured goods, staring at screens that give us an impoverished simulacrum of the luminous, breathing world. We have banished all for the sake of a blue light that promises to cater to our personal proclivities but does little more than offer standardized images that never satiate our deepest hunger. We are flattened, pixelated in the process, losing something of what it means to be a human being. We become, in Forster’s words, flat characters to one another and even to ourselves. When we work so hard at making memories—another term that makes me cringe—are we just barking our existence into the vast chamber of the internet as our lives slip away between our fingers? We seem to believe that our vapid posts, substantiated by curated photos, can preserve these moments, as though the internet has become our main repository for memory, as though meaning can be manufactured and content can fill us up, satiate our spiritual hunger.

I listen to my son sleeping in the cabin, hoping and fearing for his future. At least in sleep, he is protected. At least in sleep, especially in this dark, dark place, he is beyond the reach of the dangers of the lit world. He is, I hope, caught up in dreams, roaming his own inner wilderness.

VII. Dreamers

I suspect that Nikola Tesla, the mysterious genius of the age of electricity, was much more a man of the darkness than Edison. Throughout his life, he was gripped by powerful visions, intuiting much of what Edison came to know through trial and error. After Edison died, in 1931, Tesla told The New York Times, 

His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of his labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense.

It is that same practical American sense that values blind determination and doggedness, that holds up the blustering, blundering anti-intellectualism of the self-made man hellbent on progress, that insists on positivity and brightness, that shuns darkness, poetry, the intuitive, the mystical. 

As an old man, Tesla recounted a story about his beloved childhood cat, Mačak. “In the dusk of the evening, as I stroked Mačak’s back, I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement. Mačak’s back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house.” Tesla’s father told him, “This is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see through the trees in a storm.” His mother said, “Stop playing with this cat. He might start a fire.” But young Tesla was mesmerized, and he wondered, “Is nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God, I concluded.”

But there was more. “It was getting darker, and soon the candles were lighted. Mačak took a few steps through the room. He shook his paws as though he were treading on wet ground. I looked at him attentively. Did I see something or was it an illusion? I strained my eyes and perceived distinctly that his body was surrounded by a halo like the aureola of a saint!”

This moment stayed with Tesla his entire life. “I cannot exaggerate the effect of this marvelous night on my childish imagination. Day after day I have asked myself ‘what is electricity?’ and found no answer. Eighty years have gone by since that time and I still ask the same question, unable to answer it.”

I go back to the opening line of Whitman’s poem: “I wander all night in my vision.” I linger on the word vision. To have a vision is radically different from seeing an image. Among the definitions for vision are the following: something seen in a dream, trance, or ecstasy; a thought, concept, or object formed by the imagination; the act or power of imagination; unusual discernment or foresight. An image, on the other hand, is a visual representation of something, such as a likeness of an object produced on a photographic material or a picture produced on an electronic display. It is also a mental conception held in common by members of a group and symbolic of a basic attitude and orientation; a popular conception (as of a person, institution, or nation) projected especially through the mass media; exact likeness. We are bombarded by images, which require no act of imagination and lead us inexorably toward standardization. It is vision that we need.

Though Tesla required little sleep, often getting by on just three hours, he was a man prone to powerful visions. When he was twenty-four and living in Budapest, he and a friend took a walk one day in the city park and recited poetry. Tesla knew much poetry by heart, including Goethe’s Faust. The setting sun reminded him of a passage, which he then recited. As he was saying the words of the poem, he recounted years later, “the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.” He had just invented the induction motor.

A dozen years later, having returned to Croatia to visit his ailing mother, he had a vision in his sleep, seeing “a cloud carrying angelic figures of marvelous beauty, one of whom gazed upon me lovingly and gradually assumed the features of my mother. The vision slowly floated across the room and vanished, and I was awakened by an indescribably sweet song of many voices. In that instant a certainty, which no words can express, came upon me that my mother had just died. And it was true.”

He also foresaw the technology of our present. “When wireless is perfectly applied . . . we shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance,” he said. “Not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.” Tesla also described getting the daily newspaper “wirelessly” and an automobile that could “perform a great variety of operations with something akin to judgment.”

And his vision extended beyond the technology to the kind of world he hoped it would create. One of Tesla’s biographers, Richard Munson, writes of the inventor’s “principled belief that technology should transcend the marketplace and that invention should not just be tied to profits. He aimed high, perhaps higher than any other inventor. He worked tirelessly to offer electric power freely to the world, to build automatons that would reduce life’s drudgery, and to provide machines that could abolish war.”

A true dreamer, Tesla was a scientist with the soul of a poet. 

Our contemporary society has pushed dreamers—visionaries—to the peripheries. “The imaginative capability of the dreaming sleeper underwent a relentless erosion, and the vitiated identity of a visionary was left over for a tolerated minority of poets, artists, and mad people,” writes Crary. “Modernization could not proceed in a world populated with large numbers of individuals who believed in the value or potency of their own internal visions or voices.”

Rather than listening to dreamers, we often call them mad. This is a phenomenon that Rachel Aviv explores in Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, in which she relates the story of a woman named Bapu who was a Hindu mystic and poet in Chennai, South India. When she was diagnosed with schizophrenia by a doctor educated in the Western tradition, she felt that her own story about herself as a mystic had been “forcibly replaced by a new one about mental illness,” which was “clumsily out of step with her self-conception” and made her feel “devalued.” Perhaps it should come as no surprise that studies conducted by the World Health Organization have found that “people were more likely to recover from schizophrenia in developing nations than in developed ones.” Despite our American cult of individualism, we offer a narrow range of standardized options in regards to mental health. 

Even those of us who are not suffering an acute mental health crisis are likely to feel the pressure of a culture that values standardization and abounds with light-filled metaphors: we should look at the bright side, see the light, lighten up, and so forth. The ceaseless messages that any dark mood should be lightened, bleached by drugs or a change in attitude, are part of a mindset that has been dubbed “toxic positivity.” Some of us, as philosopher Mariana Alessandri tells us, are dark by nature, and we are right to feel sad and depressed and anxious. “I have always felt emotionally dark,” she writes. “I’m an angry person genetically, and I feel sad most of the time.” She continues, “The Light Metaphor relentlessly insists that darkness is ugly, negative, miserable.” Her book, Night Vision, is a defense of dark moods. “In the light, our dark moods make us look broken,” she writes. “In the dark, though, we look fully human.” And to be fully human is to experience the full range of emotional states. 

Instead, we pathologize unpleasant emotions, leading to overmedication and estrangement from our true selves. “Mental health has become synonymous with the absence of symptoms, rather than with a return to a person’s baseline, her mood or personality before and between periods of crisis,” Aviv writes. And some people, having been medicated for most of their lives, don’t even know what their baseline is. Rather than banishing or masking unpleasant states—sadness, inadequacy, loneliness, anxiety, discomfort, fear—I have tried to embrace the range of experiences that means I’m alive. Rather than standardizing emotions to a narrow range, I have lived my life in the frightening, murky depths. “With all our lights we push away our fear,” writes Bogard, “and by pushing away our fear, we are a little less alive.”

VIII. Darkness

My sojourn in darkness comes to an end on our penultimate day in the Porkies. I awake, leaving behind my aunts in the forest, not knowing that I will not see them again, that my connection to darkness is about to break. During a brief stop at the visitor center in the afternoon, I turn on my phone, and discover a flurry of voicemails: my older child, D., away at a Chinese immersion camp at a remote ski resort in Minnesota, has Covid. The news wrenches me back to the waking world. I immediately call, text, and email my husband. I try to reach the camp. I get through to no one. Eventually, we have to leave the Wi-Fi of the visitor center and return to our cabin.

We start packing and cleaning. I periodically wander out of the cabin with my phone and meander up and down the trails, seeking a cell connection, scanning the horizon for a ridge, a place of hope. The trees have become obstacles, my remoteness a nuisance. Finally, in a clearing on a rise, I get through to my husband: D. has been placed in an isolation cabin with other Covid patients and is being cared for by a Chinese doctor who is nursing them back to health with cucumber water. Next, I reach D., who is indecisive and discouraged. They want me to drive east tomorrow to rescue them, but they also don’t want to risk getting me and their brother sick during the long car ride home. 

It is deep twilight before I return to the cabin. The boy is already asleep. That final night, I keep my phone close to me, turned on, even though I have no cell service. Suddenly wrenched back into the illuminated world, I dip in and out of shallow dreams about my malfunctioning devices. Several times, I take my phone outside to the rise where I had previously found a pocket of connectivity, and I gaze intently at its glowing face, looking for news. I am utterly blind to the darkness around me. I have already left that world. 

In the morning, D. sends a message: they will stick it out in the Covid cabin, where they are maintaining their language immersion pledge, still speaking Mandarin, learning the words for symptoms and medications. The boy and I clear out of the cabin and start driving home.

I have been writing this essay for eighteen months. I have read twenty-seven books about darkness and night and sleeping and dreaming. This project began at the crest of summer and is ending at the trough of winter, when the days are dark. Or perhaps I should invert my thinking: in winter I stand at the crest of darkness, in summer the trough. And yet I light up the winter darkness with artificial light, spending too much time staring at the blue glare of a screen. Facebook is awash in hopeful messages about the solstice, about the return of light. Friends post Christmas greetings and New Year’s resolutions or, alternatively, screeds against New Year’s resolutions. One offers personal saints for the New Year, their names drawn out of a pretzel jar. 

One post, about Merriam-Webster’s 2023 word of the year, catches my eye: Authentic meaning “not false or imitation” or “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.” The article points out, “Ironically, with ‘authentic content creators’ now recognized as the gold standard for building trust, ‘authenticity’ has become a performance.” In other words, authenticity is no longer authentic. In typical wild-goose-chase fashion, I keep seeking, trying to find something reassuring. The Dictionary.com word of the year is hallucinate, in the sense of artificial intelligence: “to produce false information contrary to the intent of the user and present it as if true and factual.” This word, repurposed for our current moment, is also telling. Our anxieties about being authentic may also be tied up with the fact that we must now distinguish ourselves from robots, somehow tell ourselves apart from deep fakes. None of this is reassuring. I turn away from the screen, turn out the lights. I sit in darkness, which in the city is never really dark.

The night before we leave the Porkies, I open up the logbook to the first empty page. It’s my turn to offer some words about my experience, to speak to the artists who will follow me. But my thoughts are scattered—mentally, I have already left—and I attempt to say too much, creating a fragmented listicle of tips rather than a meaningful sustained meditation. “Relish the darkness,” I write in one of my bullet points. “The rest of our lives has too much illumination.” It feels like the easy wisdom of a social media post. I am creating content.

Perhaps my aunts came to me in the Porkies in part because they never led online lives, never did the enervating work of erecting digital personae, stretching themselves across platforms, reducing their experiences to standardized emojis or hashtags, desperately shoring up selves made of ones and zeroes, empty calories, fireworks and misdirection, blue glare and existential despair. In my final dream of them, I no longer have any children in my care; I am lone in the dark woods, pursuing both Olga and Susan, who move in their own special ways through the sinuous darkness. Olga runs in the nude like a graceful animal, while Susan strides purposefully, swinging her arm, magically changing her clothes as she goes. They do not seem aware of one another or of me, but they move in the same direction, at the same speed, and I follow them, breathless, falling farther and farther behind, until they disappear into the deepest, most impenetrable heartwood of the night.

“There is a well-known critical tradition, going back to the late nineteenth century, which identifies the standardization of experience as one of the defining attributes of Western modernity,” writes Crary. Susan’s and Olga’s lives burgeoned beyond standardized experience. They were probably the most authentic people I’ve known, and I don’t use that term lightly. In seeking them in the darkness, in chasing them through my Porkies dreamworld, perhaps I was doing the long, protracted work of mourning them. I missed Olga, especially the many years she was gone from my life, due to geographical distance. I saw her last in 1999. And I missed Susan not just as she was but as she might have been. We lose people in different ways.

My only two aunts by blood, the younger and only sisters of my parents, were born and lived their entire lives and died in one place—yet in their minds they roved farther than anyone else I have known. In life, they never stepped foot in my hemlock forest, but I leave them there now. I leave them to the darkness, where they await me, where I will one day join them.  

In memory of

Susan Bea Renfro
July 29, 1947–January 19, 2016
Riverside, California

Olga Alexandrovna Stulova
April 26, 1958–July 23, 2020
Samara, Russia

---

Yelizaveta p. Renfro is the author of a collection of essays, Xylotheque: Essays (University of New Mexico Press, 2014), and a collection of short stories, A Catalog of Everything in the World (Black Lawrence Press, 2011). Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blue Mesa Review, Colorado Review, Glimmer Train, North American Review, Orion, Witness, and elsewhere.

---